Zorro (50 page)

The Indian mail spread the news that Padre Mendoza was dying, and whole tribes came to bid him farewell. They came from Alta and Baja California, Arizona, and Colorado: Chumash, Shoshone, and many others.

For days and nights at a time they danced, chanting funeral songs, and before they left they placed gifts of shells, feathers, and bones on his tomb. The most ancient repeated the legend of the pearls, about how the missionary found them one day on the beach, brought there by dolphins from the depths of the sea to aid the Indians.

As for Juliana and Lafitte, you can learn about them elsewhere, since I have no more room in these pages. Much has been written in the newspapers about the corsair, although his actual fate is a mystery. He disappeared after the Americans, whom he had defended in more than one battle, wiped out his empire on Grand Island. All I can tell you is that Juliana, who grew into a robust matron, had the originality to remain enamored of her husband. Jean Lafitte changed his name, bought a ranch in Texas, and is posing as a respectable man, though deep down he will always be a bandit, please God. The couple has eight children, and I have lost count of the grandchildren.

I would rather not mention Rafael Moncada. That wicked man will never leave us alone, but Carlos Alcazar was shot to death in a tavern in San Diego, shortly after Zorro’s first intervention. They did not find the assassins, but it is said that they were paid killers. Who hired them?

I would like to tell you it was Moncada when he learned that his partner had deceived him in the business of the pearls, but that would be a literary trick to round out the story, because Moncada was back in Spain when Alcazar was shot down. His death, well deserved, of course, left the field open for Diego de la Vega to court Lolita, to whom he had to confess his identity as “Lotto before she would accept him. They were married only a couple of years before she broke her neck in a fall from a horse. Bad luck. Years later, Diego married a young woman named Esperanza, who also had a tragic death. But that story has no place in these pages. If you would see me, dear friends, I believe you would recognize me, since I have not changed much. Beautiful women lose their beauty with age, whereas women like myself just grow old, and some even look better. I myself have softened with the years. My hair is specked with gray, and none has fallen out, as Zorro’s has; I still have enough for two heads. I have a few wrinkles, which give me character, and I have almost all my teeth. I am still strong, bony, and cross-eyed. I do not look too bad for the life I have lived. Yes, I bear several proud scars from swords and bullets, suffered while helping Zorro on his missions of justice. You will ask me, I have no doubt, whether I am still in love with him, and I will have to confess that I am, but I do not suffer because of it. I remember when I saw him for the first time; he was fifteen and I was eleven, we were mere children. I was wearing a yellow dress that made me look like a wet canary. I fell in love with him right then, and he has been my only love, except for a very brief period when I took a fancy to the pirate Jean Lafitte, but my sister won him away from me, as you know. That does not mean that I remained a virgin, certainly not; I have not lacked for willing lovers, some better than others, but none was memorable. Fortunately, I did not fall madly in love with Zorro, as most women do when they meet him; I always have kept a cool head in regard to him. I realized in time that our hero is capable of loving only women who do not love him back, and I decided to be one of them. He has tried to marry me every time he has lost one of his sweethearts or been made a widower that has happened twice and I have refused. Perhaps for that reason, he dreams of me after he eats a heavy meal. If I accepted him as a husband, he would soon feel trapped, and I would have to die to set him free, as his two wives did. I would rather await our old age with the patience of a Bedouin. I know that we will be together when he is an old man with feeble legs and a soft brain, when other, younger foxes have replaced him and, in the remote possibility that some lady opened her balcony to him, he would be unable to climb to it. Then I will avenge myself of the troubles Zorro has put me through! And with that, dear readers, I conclude my narrative. I promised to tell you the origins of the legend, and I have done that; now I can devote myself to my own interests. I have had my fill of Zorro. The moment has come to put the final period to his tale. Isabel Allende was born in 1942, the cousin of Salvador Allende, who went on to become famous as the elected President of Chile deposed in a CIA-backed coup. She worked as a journalist, playwright and children’s writer in Chile until 1974 and then in Venezuela until 1984. Her first novel for adults, The House of the Spirits, was published in Spanish in 1982, beginning life as a letter to her dying grandfather. It was an international sensation, and ever since all her books have been acclaimed and adored in numerous translations worldwide. Allende is incapable of telling a bad story… her heroically sustained narrative, her lovingly prepared plots and supreme inventions explode in exaltation. ”INDEPENDENT

“Allende’s prose soars’ GUARDIAN ”Allende’s writing is so vivid we smell the countryside, hear the sounds, see the bright lands, the scorched earth, smell and even taste the soft fruit.“ THE TIMES